Every day is a Blog for Choice day here, but this post is a few days late.

When it comes to abortion, there are a lot of nutters who believe that a woman's only proper function is as a baby factory. Many, if not most, of these folks would deny it, but when you get down to their opposition of birth control and sex education, and their calls for government-enforced pregnancy, it becomes pretty clear that a woman's right to her own body -- and even her right to her own life -- is at best contingent upon absence of the presence of sperm within a stone's throw of her womb.

Then there are those folks who find abortion to be "icky" and just don't like to think about it.

The big buzz phrase now in this current period of ephemeral desire for "bi-partisan" solutions is "common ground." Find "common ground" on abortion.

Can there be common ground? Really?

The fundamentalists pushing for criminalization are not just against abortion, they're against birth control and sex education. To them, the problem isn't that teenagers are getting pregnant, it's that teenagers getting pregnant should be punished for getting pregnant. Heck, not just teenagers -- let's throw in adult women. Let's throw in married adult women. Let's throw in married adult women who've already borne familes.

As a young adult in the late '70s and early '80s, trying to juggle two or three jobs, a full college classload and an unstable husband (now ex-husband), I hoped and prayed that I would not find myself pregnant or that I would ever have to make a decision about what to do about an unwanted pregnancy.

But I felt safe knowing that, even with the precautions of birth control, that if one little sperm got through, the government would not be able to intrude in my personal decisions about my body, whatever I decided.

Today--on the 34th anniversary of Roe v Wade--I have a request. Instead of writing about the legislation, the rhetoric, or the politics surrounding reproductive rights and justice, let's keep it simple. Let's just trust women.

Seems easy enough, I know. But given that over 30 years after Roe women are still fighting the same battles, maybe we need a remedial course.

Comments

I believe the Dems will make a big difference in reguards to birth control availability,seems they have a plan.

People should be able to choose to use birth control, to avoid having to make another choice.

If you think the point of conception is NOT when life begins, and all you have is a clump of cells and not a living human being.
Then at least concider this -

Soon after you were conceived you were no more than a clump of cells.
This clump of cells was you at your earliest stage, you had plenty of growing to do but this clump of cells was you none the less.
Think about it.
Aren't you glad you were left unhindered.... to develope further.
Safe inside your mother's womb until you were born.

The "born alive" rule is a legal principle that holds that various aspects of the criminal law, such as the statutes relating to homicide and to assault, apply only to a child that is "born alive". Recent advances in the state of medical science have led to court decisions that have overturned this rule, and in several jurisdictions statutes have been explicitly framed or amended to include unborn children.

The born alive rule was originally a principle at common law in England that was carried to the United States. Its original basis was that because of the (then) state of medical science and because of the rate of still births and miscarriages, it was impossible to determine whether a child would be a living being. This inability to determine whether a child in the womb was in fact alive, and would be successfully born, had ramifications with respect to the laws relating to assault and to homicide. (It is not possible to kill a child that has already died, for example.) Thus the act of a live birth was taken to be the point at which it could be reliably determined, in law, that the various laws applied.[1][2]

However, advances in the state of the art in medical science, including ultrasonography, foetal heart monitoring, and foetoscopy, have since made it possible to determine that a child is alive within the womb, and as a consequence many jurisdictions, in particular in the United States, have taken steps to supplant or abolish this common law principle.[1]

As of 2002, 23 states in the United States still employed the rule, to lesser or greater extent.[2]

The abolition of the rule has proceeded piecemeal, from case to case and from statute to statute, rather than wholesale. One such landmark case with respect to the rule was Commonwealth vs. Cass, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where the court held that the stillbirth of an eight-month-old foetus, whose mother had been injured by a motorist, constituted vehicular homicide. By a majority decision, the Supreme Court of Massachusetts held that the foetus constituted a "person" for the purposes of the Massachusetts statute relating to vehicular homicide. In the opinion of the justices, "We think that the better rule is that infliction of perinatal injuries resulting in the death of a viable foetus, before or after it is born, is homicide.
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The Unborn Victims of Violence Act is a United States law which defines violent assault committed against pregnant women as being a crime against two persons: the woman and the fetus she carries.

This law was passed in 2004 after the murder of the then pregnant Laci Peterson and her fetus, Connor Peterson.

If it is right for a man (or woman) to be charged for homicide and sentenced to prison for killing the unborn (and rightfully so) then the unborn should have equil consideration in relation to abortion..